Session Resources: MYFest 2024

Come and dance with us!

In our first synchronous meet-up we’ll get to know each other and decide what we would like to do together. People who have done readers theater before can share their experiences, and we can decide what kinds of plays we want to read together for MYFest24, and we can also brainstorm some plays we might want to write together. And, of course, we’ll read a play. Or two!

Join us for the first community building session – meet other participants, share your hopes and expectations for MYFest, ask any questions you have. Please register in advance for this session. Click on the session name to find the registration link.

The phrase “artificial intelligence” can be quite misleading, and the difference between intelligence and understanding can be disastrous. Join this exploration of the limits of machine intelligence. Session recording and slides now available!

ChatGPT (and other LLMs) can be an all-purpose tool, but why use a hammer when you need a screwdriver? In this workshop, we’ll build customized GPTs to better serve your goals. Session recording and slides now available!

Healing circles are a means for people to come together for meaningful connection through deep listening and compassion. Using poetry, and other forms of creative expression, healing circles invite participants to move out of intellectual consciousness into emotional consciousness, connecting more deeply with what’s in their hearts as well as their minds. Spaces are limited so separate registration is required. Please click on the session name to find the link of the registration form.

Theresa Destrebecq will be facilitating a book circle on the book Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin. Book circles have maximum 18 participants, and we try to build community by maintaining the same set of people over the entire period. If you are planning to attend this book circle, you will need to fill out a separate registration form. Click of the session title to get to the registration link.

Join us for an hour of supporting each other’s writing… quietly… where we will kick off with 5 minutes of inspiration, give everyone about 50 minutes to work on what is important to them right now, and have 5 minutes to celebrate what we’ve accomplished today. This group is dedicated to anyone who is working on a writing project of any kind: you can work on a peer-reviewed paper, grant application, syllabus, even a really tricky email, even your creative work, a poem you want to capture, lyrics for your next song 🙂

Join us for the first community building session — get to know other participants more deeply, imagine how to make the most of your MYFest experience together, get support on some of your pressing challenges this year.

TBA
Note: This session is part of a track but you can attend it on its own without attending the full track.

For this session, we will be using a Voice & Silence framework to explore how we ourselves, or those we educate or support, use Voice or Silence.
This framework is a four-quadrant model which distinguishes between productive und unproductive forms of Voice and Silence. It originated from the work of Amy C. Edmondson and Tijs Besieux, with the intention of helping foster high-quality conversations.
Whether in a social, traditional work or educational environment, we all share the challenges of providing the best possible balance of equal voice, diversity of thought, reflection and critical information. This framework can offer essential insights into how inclusive our meetings, training or exchanges are and why.

The Silence & Voice is a 2 part series, with asynchronous work in the middle. Again, if you are unable to attend the 1st session, it won’t make sense to attend the 2nd session as you will be missing the foundational work, and the independent writing on the break day. However, if you can only attend the first session, you’re welcome to. Click on the Session title to get to the registration link.

Asynchronous preparation for Session 2
Writing of experiments using a dedicated Google slide deck

Join us for an hour of supporting each other’s writing… quietly… where we will kick off with 5 minutes of inspiration, give everyone about 50 minutes to work on what is important to them right now, and have 5 minutes to celebrate what we’ve accomplished today. This group is dedicated to anyone who is working on a writing project of any kind: you can work on a peer-reviewed paper, grant application, syllabus, even a really tricky email, even your creative work, a poem you want to capture, lyrics for your next song 🙂

To live a meaningful, happy and fulfilled life, we as adults take the charge and responsibility to heal ourselves from whatever made us disconnected from our essence. We take the lead to restore our authentic self to accept who we are and acknowledge our unmet needs and unattended emotions; some of us feel unsafe, unseen, unaccepted or unworthy; some feel not good enough to show up to the world as who we are; gradually and subconsciously we developed a survival persona with its various coping mechanisms to feel safe and significant.

Some of us have developed a selfless pattern of behaviors and some have developed selfish patterns. Becoming awakened through pain and struggles, some of us are ready to see and perceive that self-kindness is crucial for health & growth. Our journey with understanding our 8 capacities gives us safe spaces to reach out to ourselves and expand our inner wisdom to restore our self-concept and reconstruct our beliefs; a new set of beliefs that enables us to break the cycle of unhealthy patterns and move forward in-life.

I have created the need for developing the 8 capacities within us out of my own personal wisdom of how self compassion is crucial to receiving and living a healthier life. I was able to connect, feel and heal. I have progressed on reclaiming my inner wisdom and enjoyed a new reality of becoming self compassionate. Recording and slides now available.

Session 2: In this follow-up session, we will be • sharing our experiments with each other • cross-checking the experiments with the insights from Session 1 • refining and fine-tuning our experiments to plug-and-play Takeaways At the end of both sessions, you will have a more diverse understanding of how people contribute and what they need to do so productively. In addition, you will have a collection of experiments to use for your own work environments. In this follow-up session, we will be • sharing our experiments with each other • cross-checking the experiments with the insights from Session 1 • refining and fine-tuning our experiments to plug-and-play Takeaways At the end of both sessions, you will have a more diverse understanding of how people contribute and what they need to do so productively. In addition, you will have a collection of experiments to use for your own work environments.

This hour-long interactive workshop will introduce 3 approaches to working effectively with change-resistors & work through a case study together, with plenty of time for reflection and sharing. Outcome: lowered frustration for trainers and aspiring change-makers. Session recording, worksheets, and slides now available!

In the face of systems of oppression, it’s easy to feel down-trodden and hopeless. In this workshop, we will identify types of power, what our power-style might be, and build solidarity and mental well-being for/with one another. Session recording and slides now available!

This interactive session will look at poetry and how it can be used to support reflective practice and learning in higher education and beyond. Session recording and slides now available!

Join us for a low-key session dedicated to baking and cooking. Bring your own recipe to bake/cook in your kitchen and share with other participants. Recipes can be also be shared via Padlet or the Slack baking-cooking channel before the session so that others can buy ingredients to try out a new recipe during the session. Feel free to join and leave at any time during the 90-minute session, and of course, family members are very welcome! Even if you don’t want to bake or cook during the session, we encourage you to come and chat with the group. If participants find the session enjoyable, we’ll be happy to organize a second baking and cooking session.

Who are we and how do we show that in our writing? That is one of the big questions that surrounds how AI might be used in writing assignments and professional publications. How do we ensure that our voices and ideas are shining through and how do we determine when to acknowledge AI’s help in bringing our ideas to the page. This session will look at some of the discussions around ethical, responsible, and transparent AI use in writing assignments. There will be time allotted for questions, so please come ready to engage in discussion on these ideas. Session recording now available!

For details, see the MYFest Readers Theater website https://sites.google.com/view/ccreaderstheater/myfest24
All ages welcome!

Students often struggle to engage with academic writing, expressing feelings of disconnection, discomfort and even dislike. Such feelings may lead some students to turn to AI, often employing it uncritically in order to complete their writing assignments, thus losing their voice. Humanizing the writing classroom through centering the element of voice may offer a great way to address these concerns. In light of AI concerns in particular, voice takes on even more importance as one of the aspects to writing that may distinguish human writing from AI writing. Focusing on voice may allow students to connect more meaningfully with academic writing as a mode of communication because it can make writing more personally relevant to them and expressive of their identities. Thus, it is our belief that by humanizing the writing classroom through centering voice, students may be less likely to rely solely on AI, and rather develop more critical approaches to their writing. However, providing effective instruction for students to develop their academic writing voice can be challenging. In this session, we will provide a brief background on voice in academic writing, and then share several activities that the presenters have tried with their students to help them (a) explore voice and its importance, especially in the age of AI, (b) reflect on their own developing voice constructions, and (c) develop more ownership over their writing. Session recording and slides now available!

In this three-part session series, we use the metaphoric structure: AI as a Growing Child. So in this first session we will describe AI’s impact on democracy as the “adolescent phase,” where it can be rebellious and unpredictable. Just as it would be irresponsible to let a young child adolescent play with a firearm, AI and elections are a volative mix. From deep-faked images of politicians to more subtle threats that can disable government infrastructure, this session demonstrates how AI tools can help saboteurs destabilize democracy. Participants will learn the weaknesses of commonly proposed solutions like AI watermarks as well as other solutions with a greater chance of safeguarding the democratic process. Session recording now available!

What is trauma? How can we shape our pedagogical practices to support students in their learning despite being impacted by trauma? We’ll explore these questions in this interactive session about Trauma-Informed Pedagogy. This session is part of a track but you can attend it on its own without attending the full track. Session resources now available!

Join us for an hour of supporting each other’s writing… quietly… where we will kick off with 5 minutes of inspiration, give everyone about 50 minutes to work on what is important to them right now, and have 5 minutes to celebrate what we’ve accomplished today. This group is dedicated to anyone who is working on a writing project of any kind: you can work on a peer-reviewed paper, grant application, syllabus, even a really tricky email, even your creative work, a poem you want to capture, lyrics for your next song 🙂

In this interactive session, we’ll test out various forms of targeted AI writing feedback. How can AI feedback be incorporated to support students’ development of their own voice and ideas and also to give students practice questioning plausible AI advice? Can we put AI in a limited place where it supplements the responses of human readers and stimulates student thinking without telling them what to write? We’ll explore student comments on how it felt to use AI feedback from recent pilots of the teacher-created app MyEssayFeedback.ai. Session recording now available!

Sometimes caricatured as mere regurgitators of online content, tools like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are more like a growing child that is facile at fabricating fresh ideas and novel imagery. A peek under the hood of these models will equip participants to grasp their special brand of creativity, along with their limits in representing diverse perspectives and potential for disinformation. Session recording now available!

A Bring Your Own Book (BYOB) Circle, is an opportunity for individuals to come together virtually to share their love of reading.

Unlike a traditional book club, where everyone brings a commonly read book, these BYOB circles invite anyone to come with any book that they have read, or are currently reading, based on a central theme.

With the support of a facilitator, these events are meant to create community, inspire new reading and learning, and engage with one another in fun and unique ways.

This interactive workshop encourages participants to critically examine how and why generative AI tools were designed and what that means for their use in education. Topics of exploration include: Bias, Hallucinations, Exploitation of Human Labor, Data & Privacy, Digital Divide, Academic Integrity, and Intellectual Property Rights. As participants explore each of these topics, they will consider how to bring these critical issues into their practice and how to help prepare students to become critical AI users. Session recording now available!

Maturity, whether in childhood development or in AI use, means knowing when to trust instinctual responses and when to check their unimpeded influence. Drawing on a range of sources from the mathematics of probability to Roman history, this workshop proposes a framework for sifting appropriate uses of AI from those that can cause undue harm, be they in healthcare, business, or education. (Spoiler: it’s not high- versus low-risk tasks!) Session recording now available!

From time immemorial, human beings have reached out to the world with words, hoping to connect and communicate. But in a world where the machine can do some things more effectively and efficiently, how do we now reckon with the art and science of writing? This conversation about AI is an invitation to brainstorm together about how to center our humanness in a increasingly automated world.

Trigger warnings can take many forms. If used alone to warn about sensitive material, they may have no effect or even be harmful. A broader, preventive approach and a careful response for when triggers do occur are explored in this interactive session. Session resources now available!

This session is part of a track but you can attend it on its own without attending the full track.

We’re devoting our Wisdom of Fools synchronous session to stories about donkeys. We’ll read some folktales about donkeys and collaboratively adapt and write up the ones participants like best in a readers theater script starring donkeys. After the session, participants can continue working on the script asynchronously as little or much as they wish, and we’ll definitely read the finished script together in a future MYFest24 readers theater session. This is a low-key, fun, and creative session for all ages. Family members are very welcome!